I've noticed a lot more typos and non-sequiturs in forums, blog posts and news articles in the last two years. Maybe K12 should teach kids to write proper English, since the AIs are clearly not helping to solve that basic problem.

Notre Dame was partially destroyed multiple times since 1163 and (luckily) repaired each time. It was also redesigned multiple times to avoid imminent collapse. Notre Dame's repair plan was external.

The wood needed for repairs required tall and straight trees, hundreds of years old, planted in special purpose forests. These forests are mostly gone due to other factors, and this time there was a scavenger hunt across the country just to find enough replacement trees. Previously, suitable old trees were plentiful. In terms of redesign, unforeseen extra buttresses were needed to reinforce the structure centuries later.

In space, there is no external repair plan and no redesign of unforeseen flaws. The density of particles is too low to collect material outside the space ship. Recycling has limited applicability over many cycles due to degradation. Carrying extensive repair materials also adds unacceptable mass, which reduces the top travel speed and increases travel time by centuries. Increased travel time means increased time for degradation.

The design needs to be complete and resilient from the beginning, not rely on future cleverness and external resources every 50 years or so to patch up unforeseen problems. Space is hard and we have never attempted something even remotely similar on such a timescale.

Never say never. Some kids are fucked up. The answer is that general one size fits all solutions (either throw all of them in jail, or never throw anyone in jail) are suboptimal.

What happens when the first generation of kids comes of age, notices they never gave consent to be confined to a ship for their entire lives, and decides to turn around?

Religion is a tried and true solution used by humanity many times previously to solve just that very same issue.

Personally though I think that the engineering problems dwarf the social ones. Humanity's longest lived buildings are only a few thousand years old, and they are basically ruins not fit to live in. We have no clue how to build anything that would stay intact and fit for purpose over 500 years.

You're cute. Denying the competition exists is a losing strategy. I'm making popcorn.

Not really, to be honest. A lot of the stuff that the scientists and engineers do with the tools could be done another way, and often has. The actual *excess* return on investment, once you remove what previous solutions achieved in the same space, is rather unimpressive and close to zero.

The world works by having each generation forget the past, and think they are clever reinventing things for the first time in a new way. *Actual* progress almost never comes close to the hype.

There's no if. The AI software offerings targeted to medium to large companies do not work in the way you think (or hope) they do. There would be no point in such piecemeal and security conscious integration. It doesn't scale. The proposition is to let the AI loose on internal documentation, and to connect AI with internal software services via RAG technologies. Dedicated attackers *will* get deep access through convoluted attacks.

I don't think the hallucination problem is the bigger one compared to jailbreaking. Hallucinations are garbage out type phenomena. Whereas jailbreaking are commandeering the AI type of phenomena. The business dream is to give AI direct access to internal information and independent agency to perform critical business operations. Those are the juicy targets of jailbreaking attacks.

The OP didn't. I'm mystified how you would come to such a conclusion, though. Care to share your reasoning?

What is the worth of a snitch inside of every company who will tell you inside information about that company whenever you feel like asking?

Unimportant. The attack surface is (rightly) huge. They will need separate stickers for all possible body parts.

Yup, if only there was some small Central-European country that could have demonstrated that direct democracy could work at the nationnal level.
But no, nope, there absolutely none, nothing to see here, move along...

That one upset me and made me nervous.

A huge issue with the DragonAge game was that they spent a massive amount of development time trying to turn it into a 'live service' game, then pivoted to a classical single-player experience. Putting the sociopolitical messaging aside (and whether it was 'real' or 'perceived'), a development cycle that completely pivots that sort of underlying, fundamental paradigm shift is going to undo a massive amount of development work...and EA still found it necessary to have the devs do a bunch of last minute 'crunch' and 'ship now patch later'...which meant that the early reviews reflected some of the rough edges, and then the sociopolitical messaging accusations at the height of "anti-woke" sentiment was just the icing on the cake...and thus, the flop.

So, my concern was - and still is - that the suits at EA are going to grab their Excel spreadsheets and see that FIFA still makes a mint, while single player games don't...and ignore everything else and blame DragonAge's bad numbers on the absence of microtransations and lootboxes and season passes.

They've been real quiet this year on the Mass Effect front; I'm nervous that they're pivoting again because of the DragonAge failure, rather than looking at Elden Ring or Baulder's Gate or Cyberpunk 2077 as evidence that single player games can, in fact, still make money.

The main missing point on your list:

- popular initiatives and regularly held referendums (i.e.: the general population voting on most decisions, and bringing new decisions to be voted upon).

i.e.: what a *direct* Democracy (a.k.a. the only *true* Democracy in the sense of directly giving political power (cratos) to the general population (demos) - not merely putting, in decision-making roles some "representatives" who will be then subject to legalized bribes... huh... sorry to "lobbying")

You might notice there's a certain overlap between "country that follow direct democracy" and "country which avoided the last two rounds of world war" (despite rampant fascism at the same time in the rest of the continent around). These might be at least somewhat linked.

I disagree. Ask the person in the street. Big flat nose, curly hairs...negro. Slanted eyelids.... Chinese. Big tall and white... Skandinavian. It doesn't take much to look at a different body and make facile classifications. Science has spent the last 100 years debunking the idea that external differences imply mental differences. Not long ago in historical terms people genuinely believed that skin colour was related to the presence of absence of intelligence (also gender). And even if you were white, you would be called black if one of your ancestors was black. And if that couldn't be proven, a body resemblance was enough.